The Internet has emerged as a critical communication infrastructure, carrying traffic for a wide range of important applications. Internet services such as VoIP and SoIP services are becoming ubiquitous and more and more businesses and consumers are relying on their Internet connections for much of their voice and data communications. Businesses and consumers connect their routers to the Internet for sending and receiving packets. The routers utilize routing protocols to determine a path for sending the packets. For example, routers may have multiple label-switched paths available for sending packets over a large network. When impairment is reported by a customer, isolating the failure involves checking each label-switched-path that may have been used by a packet to determine whether or not it is working properly. Unfortunately, the service provider's network may have hundreds or possibly thousands of available label-switched paths for the customer's traffic. As such, the checking process is very labor intensive and may require some time before the impairment is isolated. Due to the difficulty in isolating the impairment in a timely manner, it is often the case that the service provider may receive repeated reports from the customer reporting on the same impairments. This often results in dissatisfaction by the customer, thereby leading to potential loss of business.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus that diagnoses and isolates label-switched-path impairments rapidly and accurately.